The meaning of Playdom and Disney, the debate is on!

Rather than just link to my friend Laurent, I am going to offer my point versus count-point analysis. The debate is on!

The Facebook gaming phenomenon is about to get hotter.

I agree but not completely. I think social gaming will become more mainstream as Pixel and Disney characters get their own private FarmVille’s, but the market is still controlled by distribution and the social graph, which is owned as of now by Facebook.

Look for the next acquisition to be CrowdStar

I am going to go out on a limb and disagree. CrowdStar is surely the best next candidate to be acquired. But, I think they are in the game to go public. If CrowdStar can wait it out and Zynga goes public, CrowdStar can follow in Zynga’s footsteps (everyone who would have missed out on a Zynga IPO will jump at CrowdStar). They will need another hit game first (preferably one that does not start with the word “Happy”) to pull that off though.

Big branded IP makes its way to Facebook.

I totally agree. It happened on every gaming platform and it will happen on Facebook. The question is how powerful will brands as Facebook games? Given Old Spice Guy’s popularity through social media, I think very powerful.

Facebook will have to acknowledge that it is a gaming platform at some level

If the investors have their way, I agree. Facebook needs to acknowledge to themselves and the world that half their traffic and revenues are games-driven (as Laurent says). I do think that Facebook has plans to dominate the world via advertising (see my latest article on this subject here via Wall Street Journal) and that Mark Zuckerberg will never admit how important gaming is to Facebook. I don’t think Facebook is a games company in the same way that Microsoft is not a games company because of the Xbox, but it’s a key pillar to their business.